cdrtools (formerly cdrecord) creates home-burned CDs/DVDs with a CDR/CDRW/DVD/BluRay recorder. It works as a burn engine for several applications. It supports CD/DVD/BD recorders from many different vendors; all SCSI-3/mmc- and
ATAPI/mmc-compliant drives should also work. Supported features include IDE/ATAPI, parallel port, and SCSI drives; audio CDs, data CDs, and mixed CDs; full multi-session support; CD-RWs, DVD-R/-RW, DVD+R/+RW, BD-R/BD-RE;
and TAO, DAO, RAW, and human-readable error messages. cdrtools includes remote SCSI support and can access local or remote CD/DVD/BD writers.

Syslinux is a collection of boot loaders for Linux
and other operating systems which operates on
Linux ext2/ext3 filesystems, MS-DOS FAT
filesystems, network servers using PXE firmware,
or from CD-ROMs. Syslinux has an advanced
extension API and contains two optional menu
systems. It also includes MEMDISK, a tool for
booting legacy operating systems from
non-traditional media like PXE or CD-ROM.

LILO is a Boot loader for Linux/x86 and other PC operating systems. It is responsible for loading your Linux kernel from either a floppy or a hard drive and passing control to it. It is capable of booting beyond cylinder 1024 of a hard disk if the BIOS supports EDD packet call extensions to the int 0x13 interface. LILO can also be used to boot many other operating systems, including DOS, Windows (all versions), OS/2, and the BSD variants. The LILO distribution includes full source, documentation and support files.

BusyBox combines tiny versions of many common UNIX utilities into a single small executable. It provides minimalist replacements for most of the utilities you usually find in GNU fileutils, shellutils, etc. The utilities in BusyBox generally have fewer options than their full-featured GNU cousins; however, the options that are included provide the expected functionality and behave very much like their GNU counterparts. BusyBox provides a fairly complete POSIX environment for any small or embedded system.

mkisofs is used for premastering iso9660 filesystems which are used on CDROMs. The output of mkisofs can then be sent to a CDROM writer with a utility such as cdrecord. It has support for many formats, including Rock Ridge, Joliet, and Apple HFS (beta).

INSERT (the Inside Security Rescue Toolkit) aims
to be a multi-functional, multi-purpose disaster
recovery and network analysis system. It boots
from a credit card-sized CD-ROM and is basically a
stripped-down version of Knoppix. It features good
hardware detection, fluxbox, emelfm, links-hacked,
ssh, tcpdump, nmap, chntpwd, and much more. It
provides full read-write support for NTFS
partitions (using ntfs-3g), and the ClamAV virus
scanner (including a fairly recent signature
database and a GUI). It provides partition
handling with gParted and also has a network boot
facility.

GeeXboX is a standalone media player Linux
distribution, similar to MoviX. It's a small
bootable CD that allows you to play your favorite
video (DivX, XviD, H.264, MPEG 1/2, VCD, DVD,
OggMedia, Windows Media, RealMedia, etc.) and
audio (MP3, Audio CD, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MPC, etc.) files. It
also supports networking, and is able to play media
from Windows/Samba share, NFS, UPnP A/V Media Servers, RTP/RTSP servers, or SHOUTcast. It supports TV-out, TV tuners, DVB cards, and WiFi cards. It is based on MPlayer, and can be used on any x86, x86_64, or PowerPC computer. It's easy to modify the source to build your own GeeXboX or use an alternative
boot method.

The Mandos system allows computers to have encrypted root file systems and at the same time be capable of remote or unattended reboots. The computers run a small client program in the initial RAM disk environment which will communicate with a server over a network. All network communication is encrypted using TLS. The clients are identified by the server using an OpenPGP key that is unique to each client. The server sends the clients an encrypted password. The encrypted password is decrypted by the clients using the same OpenPGP key, and the password is then used to unlock the root file system.